-Research, purchase, and implement a new backup solution suited to the virtualized workload to replace Macrium Reflect Server which was most assuredly not designed for virtual servers.

After joining the company in Feb. 2014, it was pretty obvious that the MSP that had been managing things prior to my arrival didn't give it their best. This project started when my team complained to me about lag and latency on the network that was due to our old, single server being pegged to the max and out of memory. Single SQL transactions would sometimes take 30 seconds. The x86 hardware couldn't address an more memory and hard drives were failing. It was determined that replacement was in order.

After contacting our EHR vendor and determining what hardware would be both sufficient now and scalable into the future, I settled on Dell Poweredge T620 with Xeon 2650v2 processors and 64GB of memory and a PERC H710P RAID controller. Our software requires RAID, so we built a RAID 10 array with 2.4TB raw storage. We also have a large stand-alone SATA drive that handles user backups from local machines, kind of a staging area for user data while the server backs it up.

Because the determination was made early on to run heavily virtualized we opted for Windows 2012R2 Datacenter. Backup is being handled by Unitrends Virtual Backup, which has been fantastic.UVB runs on the Hyper-V (or ESXi) Hypervisor as a guest VM inside its own custom OS. UVB was set to back up to an external NAS. BGInfo was used on each VM desktop for easy identification.

New VM's were started for each service and VM's activated with AVMA. As our office was on a Workgroup this was a prime time to implement an Active Directory domain. Forensit ProfWiz was used to copy user's local profiles to the new domain profile.

Part of our business requires us to allow our clients to review their data that resides on our system and they use our system for scheduling patient visits, so an SSL secured session based Remote Desktop gateway with published EHR was configured for remote client access.

All said it was a very successful project. The only thing the users noticed was the sign in procedure changed (What's this Ctrl Alt Del thing I have to press to log in?) and the fast response of the new system compared to the old war horse that we sent to the glue factory.